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Thursday, 9 May 2013

Is Homosexuality as Harmless and Healthy as Political Correctness Dictates?

In psychology and psychiatry, a condition is considered pathological when it results in behaviours or states of mind which are harmful to oneself and/or others.

Sometimes it is a question of degree. All of us, for example, have little insignificant rituals, or irrational beliefs, or acts of superstition that serve no purpose but are harmless enough. When these come to dominate somebody's life and seriously interfere with normal everyday functioning, they are deemed a disorder, specifically Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

We all generally keep objects that only occupy space without any use or function, but it is only when the house becomes a suffocating repository of towering piles of junk and old newspapers that this behaviour is called "hoarding" and treated as a disease.

So, it is the consequences that signal pathology.

Paedophilia is considered an illness because it is believed that children and young people under the age of consent will be harmed by sexual relationships, especially with adults.

Incidentally, the very fact that the age of consent, even in the Western world alone, varies considerably and can be as low as 13 in Spain and as high as 18 in the USA shows how unclear and uncertain many of our notions about sex ethics are.

Therefore, so the current consensus goes, paedophilia is an abnormality and homosexuality, for example, is not purely because of the consequences, harmful in the former and innocuous in the latter.

This is the received wisdom, the present-day orthodoxy and dogma which, interestingly enough, is very different from that of not just 100, or 50, but even a few years ago, when same-sex marriage, for instance, was still generally regarded as, well, queer.

So, if we think that our ideas were so terribly wrong then, they might as well be wrong now, and maybe in a decade or two from today they will have changed all over again, in the same or in the opposite direction.

"Homosexuality" can refer to two things: homosexual tendency and homosexual behaviour. As in many other cases in psychology and psychiatry, it is the acting on the tendency, namely the behaviour, that can more appropriately be considered pathological or not.

If we look at homosexual behaviour in men, we see persons who are prepared to take extraordinary, lethal health risks in order to satisfy their tendency.

Before looking into the evidence of brain, genes or hormones we need to recognise that the male body is not designed to be penetrated during sexual intercourse. The lining of the anus is much thinner than the vagina and tears very easily. The lining of the anus, compared to the lining of the vagina, is also designed for nutrients to pass through it - where a healthy vagina will stop sperm entering any part of the body except the reproductive system the anus will allow semen (and any disease it carries) into the blood stream. Also the anal sphincter muscle is designed to expel not accept objects which can lead to problems in later life...

So biologically the male and female bodies are compatible with each other not bodies of the same gender.

The Surgeon General (C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General 1982-1989) has said, "Condoms provide some protection, but anal intercourse is simply too dangerous to practice".

Condoms may be more likely to break during anal intercourse than during other types of sex because of the greater amount of friction and other stresses involved.

Even if the condom doesn't break, anal intercourse is very risky because it can cause tissue in the rectum to tear and bleed. These tears allow disease germs to pass more easily from one partner to the other.

The often-repeated wishful thinking "panacea" of the use of condom is just that, a wishful thinking myth.

In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men [for smokers is 7 years less]. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.

Are men engaging in sex with other men only harming themselves, although that in itself would be sufficient to recognize this behaviour as psychologically pathological?

All this shows that male homosexual behaviour has consequences that, if political correctness and fears of being ostracized as a "homophobe" - things that have nothing to do with medical or psychological considerations - did not stand in the way, would rightly make it classified as pathological.

2 comments:

Interesting that you mention a Canadian report. in the city of Vancouver, British Columbia , homosexual men are now responsible for 95% of all syphilis cases. Think about that. In a city with a population of over 578,000, a mere 53,500 identify themselves as gay and lesbian. Even if a mere 25-30,000 of these were homosexual men, this still means that they have an extremely high percentage of HIV/AIDS and STDs over the heterosexual population.

Now Section 28 has gone, maybe some independent schools will be brave and honest enough to ignore political correctness, and, using the sound logic this article's argument is based on, educate their pupils to be aware of the destructiveness and anti-social aspects of homosexual behaviour.

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.